Category Archives: Urban scene

Aug 04 2012
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Daily Post, Urban scene

The CIS building, Manchester

Friday 3rd August 2012, 3.40pm (day 344)

CIS building, 3-8-12

This  building is only a couple of hundred yards from Victoria station but I never have normal cause to go past it. Today, after I had a meeting nearby, was an exception. When built in 1962 it was the tallest office building in the UK, at 399 feet, and it remained the tallest in Manchester until 2006 when the Beetham tower (510 feet) was built on Deansgate. It’s one of the group of buildings around this site that are the headquarters of the Co-operative Group (bank, stores, insurance, etc.).

I’ve never been inside it but it does have a significant role to play in my life. My mother and father both worked for the CIS but in separate buildings and only when this was built (when they were 18) did they begin working in the same place – and thus met. Arguably, then, if this hadn’t been built, I wouldn’t be here.

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Aug 01 2012
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Daily Post, Urban scene

Manchester ‘Olympic village’

Tuesday 31st July 2012, 3.50pm (day 341)

Manchester Olympic village, 31/7/12

In some city down South the Olympics are on, and Manchester (which is hosting some of the football tournament’s games) gets in on the act with a ‘village’ built around Exchange Square, where the wheel used to be (see previous photos). Judging from this shot, it is doing about as well at filling its seats as London is.

Cynical? No, I’m not, not about the athletes anyway. But we all knew that the promises of a ‘people’s Games’ were rubbish when they were made in 2005, so why are we surprised it’s turned into a corporate love-fest in which the relatives and friends of athletes can’t see them perform, while swathes of corporate junket seats sit empty, because bigger profits are made that way? I also remember hearing that the ‘brand poiice’ don’t want anyone to link to the official Olympic site if they are going to be critical of it.

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Jul 30 2012
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Daily Post, Hebden Bridge, Urban scene

Unity Street, Hebden Bridge

Monday 30th July 2012, 6.00pm (day 340)

Unity Street, 30/7/12

Hebden Bridge, and the British summer, and I have had a bit of a falling out over the last few weeks. It kind of started around June 21st and has gone on from there. Today, we all started toward a reconciliation of sorts. Let’s hope it continues.

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Jul 24 2012
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Daily Post, Hebden Bridge, Landscape

The Nutclough stream, later

Tuesday 24th July 2012, 4.40pm (day 334)

Nutclough stream, 24/7/12

On a pleasant summer’s day, here is the Nutclough stream, looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in its flow. (It probably wouldn’t.) This is the stream that turned into a torrent on 9th July and took out a couple of houses two hundred yards downstream. More before and after comparison pictures are on the Facebook album, as linked.

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Jul 22 2012
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Daily Post, Friend, Hebden Bridge, Portrait, Urban scene

The ‘Save the Railway’ meeting

Sunday 22nd July 2012, 3.10pm (day 332)

Save the Railway, 22/7/12

Here is not the place for the fine detail, but the ‘significant’ news that hit on my first day in Tuscaloosa, mentioned below, was that the giant ‘pubco’ (pub ownership company) that owns the Railway has decided that it is unwilling to stump up the cost of a refurbishment following the damage caused by the floods on 22nd/23rd June and 9th July. They want to sell the pub, but no one is particularly convinced that they have an interest in keeping the pub in the hands of someone who will, well, keep it as a pub and not convert it into something else. The last few years in the UK have, to say the least, not been kind to the pub trade.

Well, we – the customers – want to keep it as a pub, so today we had a meeting there to discuss what we were going to do. It was a lovely sunny day and there was also a social aspect to it – no one wanted their last drink here to be that horrible 22nd June. But it shouldn’t have to be the last today, either. We’ll try not to make it the last.

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Jul 20 2012
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Daily Post, Urban scene

The legacy of 27 April, 2011

Thursday 19th July 2012, 6.55pm (day 329)

Tornado legacy, 19/7/12

This is not a particularly ‘good’ photo in aesthetic or technical terms but it is the most meaningful picture I took today.

I said a few days ago that Tuscaloosa is not a very eventful place, and this is true generally, but an exception to the rule came on 27th April 2011 when it was hit by an utterly devastating tornado. 47 people died in the early evening of that day. I remember when I heard about it on the news, and the fact I had visited here previously and knew Angela (my research colleague) gave the disaster a personal dimension that it might not otherwise have had for many people. Angela, her husband, and their house, were all fine, but therein lies the scary nature of this particular natural phenomenon. Less than a third of a mile from her place – and we drove through these districts today as I went to dinner at her house – there were these scenes of total destruction, and I mean total. The narrow line that the storm took remains completely visible on the ground fifteen months later, marked by shattered trees and empty lots (like this one), even where houses literally on the other side of the street are OK.

What with my visit to New Orleans (still with visible signs of damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005) and the Hebden Bridge floods I know I am developing a recurring ‘natural disaster’ theme here: but believe me, I don’t want to. I just have a sudden sense of the arbitrary power of these things. You can’t protest against it, can’t vote against it, can’t cancel it; it just happens, and it’s a terrible thing when it does. I’m not a particularly religious man but I guess this is why people sometimes feel the only response is just to pray.

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Jul 18 2012
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Daily Post, Urban scene

Idiosyncracies of the US university system, part 1

Tuesday 17th July 2012, 3.20pm (day 327)

Bryant-Denny stadium, 17/7/12

There have been significant developments at home in Hebden Bridge today but here is not the place to discuss them. You will doubtless hear more about it after I am back in the UK on Saturday.

Anyway, here in Tuscaloosa, I had to include a photo of the Bryant-Denny stadium, home of the Crimson Tide, the University of Alabama (American) football team. Those of us who are not from the US have this vague idea that college sports is somehow important here in a way it is not in most other countries, but largely we do not recognise the astonishing scale of it. To put it in perspective, the population of Tuscaloosa, AL, is about 90,000. The capacity of this stadium is over 101,000. If it were in the UK – or most other countries in the world – it would be the largest stadium in the country. The whole state of Alabama treats the Tide (national champions many times, and most recently in 2009 and 2011) as if they were not only their favoured sports team, but were part of their whole cultural identity, in a similar way to Barcelona for Catalans or Celtic for Irish/Scots Catholics. At times it feels as if the college were just something that existed to support the team, rather than the other way around. The coach is the single best-paid employee of the whole university, at around $7m/year. I understand why it happens, but the scale of it continues to amaze me, even after several years of visiting US campuses to work.

And yes, I do intend to do a ‘part 2’ to this post: tomorrow or Thursday, hopefully…

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Jul 17 2012
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Daily Post, Urban scene

Main quadrangle, University of Alabama

Monday 16th July 2012, 1.30pm (day 326)

University of Alabama, 16/7/12

Like many US universities, at least, those called ‘The University of X’ where X is the name of a state, the University of Alabama is located in a relatively small town, that being, Tuscaloosa. Tuscaloosa is not the most exciting place in the world (even compared to Hebden Bridge, let alone New Orleans), so expect to see a few shots of picturesque Southern architecture over the next few days, as there’s not a great deal to capture. This is the Denny Chimes tower, a bell-tower on the southern end of the main quadrangle. Although the university has been here since 1820, only four buildings on the campus are older than 1865, because in that year the campus was burnt to the ground by Unionist troops during the War Between the States (aka the American Civil War, but I’m in the South so let’s use their term for it).

I’m here to work with my colleague Angela Benson, whose position here, as a black female academic, is more impressive than one might initially think: astonishingly, segregation on the campus was only ended in 1963 – just six years before I was born! – and was achieved despite the personal opposition of George Wallace, the state governor at the time, who literally stood ‘in the schoolhouse door’ to protest the enrolment of the first two black students.

So now you know. But I do quite like it here even if it is not a very eventful place. At least it’s warm and sunny.

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Jul 14 2012
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Daily Post, Portrait, Stranger, Urban scene

The banks of the Mississippi

Friday 13th July 2012, 8.15pm (day 323)

Mississippi, 13/7/12

Tough choice of photo today. I saw most of the city today courtesy of a driving tour in the morning from my friend/colleague Sharon, who works at the University of New Orleans, then I walked round the French Quarter in the evening, along with about twenty thousand other tourists. I took the photos everyone else takes, of St Louis Cathedral, inside a jazz club etc., and some I really liked, doubtless one or possibly more will appear on the ‘best of the rest’ page at some point soon.

However, from the five strong candidates for today’s pic of the day I went with this one. This guy was sat by the river, silently, drinking from his can of beer, as I promenaded along the levee which runs along the south side of Decatur Street. He looked so melancholy, a great contrast to all the revelry going on along Bourbon Street just three blocks away. The lights of the city in this, one of the world’s most famous rivers, set his silhouette off very well, so I’m going for this one.

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Jul 09 2012
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Daily Post, Hebden Bridge, Portrait, Stranger, Urban scene

Rescue

Monday 9th July 2012, 3.15pm (day 319)

Rescue, 9/7/12

This is the worst thing I have had to post about on this blog.

Until 1.15pm today had been a very uneventful day. It then started raining: hard. Very, very hard.

By 2.15pm the road on which I live had become a river, and then we saw that the lane which goes into the woods was pouring out water (and stones). Whether it was just rainwater or whether, as some speculated, the old reservoir at the top of the woods had burst its banks, the normally placid mill stream turned into a torrent. Where it goes under the main Keighley Road and through a sluice pipe into the river, this backed up against the retaining wall to an astonishing degree, rising literally 15 feet in half an hour and eventually pouring through the gardens of the two houses nearest the bridge.

The owners of the house were not in. Myself and other neighbours tried to save vital items and – most importantly – the two dogs (which you have seen before on this blog). But most of the ground floors were taken out. Our house is uphill from the stream, so was fine (a couple of idiot drivers ploughing through the stream at 30mph being the main threat).

More photos and footage can be seen on YouTube and Facebook for those into their weather porn. For comparison, the lake you see in the woods at a couple of points is where we played mölkky the other day.

I’m supposed to be going to New Orleans tomorrow, by the way – but I ain’t promising anything. At the moment, Hebden Bridge is impassable to cars.

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